Tag Archives: racial preferences online

Whether we want to admit it or not, online dating isn’t entirely colorblind. The good news is, we’ve made great strides in recent decades as far as racial diversity and inter-racial relationships. The maybe-not-as-good news is, there are some clear preferences that both men and women online daters have where race is concerned. This NPR article explores the details of a study done on 2.4 million heterosexual interactions via the Facebook “Are You Interested” app; four of the key findings are as follows:

1. All men appear to be interested in women of different races than their own.

2. All women (except black women) seem to prefer white men.

3. Both black men and black women got the lowest rates of response to their messages out of all the races.

Asian women are preferred by just about all men on online dating sites… Except Asian men.

Data from OKCupid supports many of these results. For example, OKCupid found that white men receive more replies to their messages from just about every group of women. White women prefer white men, but more interestingly, Asian and Hispanic women appear to prefer white men “even more exclusively.”

As uncomfortable as it may be, the data don’t lie. White men and Asian women clearly have an advantage in online dating when it comes to people of all races finding them attractive. But lest you despair of finding a mate, consider that many experts suspect that some of this data may be skewed. In the real world, the pairing of Asian women and white men isn’t as common as dating sites suggest, which could mean a variety of things. One theory is that there’s some Asian fetishism at play, a sort of “yellow fever” that makes Asian women attractive on screen but more ordinary in real life. Offline may be much different from online when it comes to real matchups.

Whatever the motivations, everyone has their own preferences for what they like. Be true to you!